On Saturday January 21, 2017, the day after Trump’s inauguration, thousands of people protested around the US (and around the world). This report asks the question “Where were the protest crowds largest?” Restricting to US data, first we look at absolute numbers, and then at protest crowd numbers relative to city population.
We rely on data gathered by Jeremy Pressman and Erica Chenoweth, taken from this site on 1/24/2017:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xa0iLqYKz8x9Yc_rfhtmSOJQ2EGgeUVjvV4A8LsIaxY/htmlview?sle=true#
See the WomensMarchCrowds.Rmd file for all the code used, and the GitHub repo for copies of the data files. We’ll use the average of the lower and upper crowd size estimates from this data set.
Here is the list of the top 25 largest protests, sorted by size.
## City State Estimate1 Estimate2 CrowdAverage
## 1 Washington DC DC 500000 680000 590000
## 2 Los Angeles, CA CA 200000 750000 475000
## 3 New York, NY NY 400000 500000 450000
## 4 Chicago, IL IL 250000 250000 250000
## 5 Boston, MA MA 175000 175000 175000
## 6 Denver, CO CO 100000 200000 150000
## 7 Seattle, WA WA 100000 175000 137500
## 8 San Francisco, CA CA 100000 150000 125000
## 9 Oakland, CA CA 100000 100000 100000
## 10 St. Paul/Minneapolis, MN MN 90000 100000 95000
## 11 Madison, WI WI 75000 100000 87500
## 12 Portland, OR OR 70000 100000 85000
## 13 Atlanta, GA GA 60000 63000 61500
## 14 Austin, TX TX 33000 72000 52500
## 15 Philadelphia, PA PA 50000 50000 50000
## 16 San Diego, CA CA 30000 40000 35000
## 17 San Jose, CA CA 25000 40000 32500
## 18 Des Moines, IA IA 26000 26000 26000
## 19 Charlotte, NC NC 20000 30000 25000
## 20 Pittsburgh, PA PA 25000 25000 25000
## 21 Sacramento, CA CA 20000 30000 25000
## 22 Phoenix, AZ AZ 20000 25000 22500
## 23 Santa Ana, CA CA 20000 25000 22500
## 24 Houston, TX TX 20000 22000 21000
## 25 St. Petersburg, FL FL 20000 20000 20000This is interesting but probably closely related to the population of the city in which the protest took place. Now we will compare the relative size of these protests normalized to the city population. For this we collect data on city population and latitude/longitude from this Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population
First we sort the 25 cities in order of CrowdRatio – the ratio of number of protesters to city population.
## City CrowdAverage Population CrowdRatio
## 1 Washington DC 590000 672228 0.877678407
## 2 Madison, WI 87500 248951 0.351474788
## 3 Boston, MA 175000 667137 0.262314937
## 4 Oakland, CA 100000 419267 0.238511497
## 5 Denver, CO 150000 682545 0.219765730
## 6 Seattle, WA 137500 684451 0.200890933
## 7 San Francisco, CA 125000 864816 0.144539416
## 8 Portland, OR 85000 632309 0.134427946
## 9 St. Paul/Minneapolis, MN 95000 711790 0.133466331
## 10 Atlanta, GA 61500 463878 0.132577962
## 11 Des Moines, IA 26000 210330 0.123615271
## 12 Los Angeles, CA 475000 3971883 0.119590632
## 13 Chicago, IL 250000 2720546 0.091893318
## 14 Pittsburgh, PA 25000 304391 0.082131206
## 15 St. Petersburg, FL 20000 257083 0.077795887
## 16 Santa Ana, CA 22500 335400 0.067084079
## 17 Austin, TX 52500 931830 0.056340749
## 18 New York, NY 450000 8550405 0.052629086
## 19 Sacramento, CA 25000 490712 0.050946380
## 20 Philadelphia, PA 50000 1567442 0.031899107
## 21 San Jose, CA 32500 1026908 0.031648405
## 22 Charlotte, NC 25000 827097 0.030226201
## 23 San Diego, CA 35000 1394928 0.025090901
## 24 Phoenix, AZ 22500 1563025 0.014395163
## 25 Houston, TX 21000 2296224 0.009145449This map gives a visualization of these ratios.